Christmas and Moving On

Christmas day was perfect. The school had a huge lunch party and 40 people showed up, mostly staff and their families from a primary school that was built by Proyecto Ecologico (the spanish school). I spent most of time time with my Swiss and English friends, and a couple from the Netherlands that are doing an environmental project in a different region of Nicaragua and came to see what kind of progress was being made in this nature reserve. Most of the afternoon and evening consisted of drinking rum and watery Nicaraguan beer and talking about politics and Borat.
The school is just across the road from the public beach of Laguana de Apoyo and just down the street from a collection of bars that were illegally built on public land (and even though the major himself was their on Christmas day asking them to please turn the reggaeton down, the situation was out of control). During the rest of the year, someone drowns in the lake once of twice a month. It´s shallow enough to walk out pretty far and then drops into the underwater volcano crater. Because of the alcohol, the week between Christmas and New Years there is sure to be drownings and injuries and actually this happens at so many beaches across Nicaragua that it was a front page story the day after Christmas. Starting at 9am buses of people starting arriving to celebrate the Lord´s birth and by 10am people were passing out on the road. My friend Peter (a generous, impatient, thickly accented Chicagoan) picked me up in his car and as we´re driving down the street a man passed out on the hood. Peter has a house and farm on the very top of the lip of the crater and through a telescope I could see all the way past Granada to Lake Nicaragua.
December 26th I woke up to catch the 6:30 bus to Masaya and had to have a dutch escort because there were still suspicious drunks who had apparently celebrated through the night lurking around. From Masaya I took another bus to Managua and then another to Leon and made it here by lunch time. This city is one of the hottest in Nicaragua (and I think Central America) and university town. I spent the next 2 nights in a dorm room of Via Via that shares a half high wall with the bar and restaurant. If you´re headed this way bring ear plugs.

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